The present invention relates to a communication service method for a telephone such as a hand-held telephone or mobile phone and a hand-held telephone that uses such services and, more particularly, to designation and signaling of a suspend period.
Conventionally, when a person carrying a hand-held telephone is having a business talk or attending a meeting, party, or the like while his or her hand-held telephone is kept ON, such hand-held telephone informs him or her of the presence of an incoming call by a ringing tone, vibrations, or the like. Conventionally, the user answers the phone at that place or by quitting his or her seat. If the conversations made so far are interrupted since the user of the hand-held telephone answers the phone, for example, such behavior may offend the feelings of a person the user has been talking to or may cause troubles to other attendants of the meeting.
In such case, if the user turns off the power switch of the hand-held telephone in advance or simultaneously with call termination, he or she no longer troubles the person the user has been talking to or the attendants of the meeting, but cannot know business of the calling party. Furthermore, when the user turns off the power switch of the hand-held telephone in advance, he or she cannot recognize even that he or she has indeed received a call. Moreover, the calling party cannot understand the current situation of the user of the hand-held telephone, and cannot find out when the user will answer the phone, thus feeling anxiety and irritation.
Such problem is also posed when the user of the hand-held telephone turns off the power switch if he or she is traveling by some traffic facility or wants to rest.
Note that the following service is available. With this service, a call to be placed to the OFF hand-held telephone is received by a hand-held telephone service center instead to receive the corresponding message, and the user of the hand-held telephone inquires of the center later to hear the message. Furthermore, a service for transferring a call to a designated telephone number is also available.
However, with an automatic answering phone service, a message is delivered to the called party after a certain delay time, and during this delay time, the calling party cannot detect the state of the called party. On the other hand, with a call transfer service, another person must attend at the destination of call transfer. As described above, with these services, some problems remain unsolved.